Annnnd, to this day, the Quest forum remains so very, very broken and bad.

But they have a message system now! Well, sort of. Rudimentary electronic person to person communication has apparently finally been reestablished after a very very long time without, anyway. This fills me with great confidence in the future of the one other reasonable alternative to Inform.

Maybe we were wrong to dunk on RAIF back in the day. Migrating to Usenet might actually be a step up for the Quest community, at this point. :/

Oh, I wouldn't go quite that far. Even the world's worst forum - which pretty much is what they have over there on the Quest site - is still head and shoulders above the awful RAIF group used back in the day. Well, a small head and tiny shoulders.

Yay. They have a basic messaging service. (And my God, it is basic as well. You can't just send a message to someone by typing in their name, but you need to find a post by them on the forum. As the forum lacks a member list and the built-in search is just a Google search bar which doesn't often restrict its searches to the forum, that adds a whole other level of annoyance to what should be a simple task. For example, if you're trying to message someone who doesn't post regularly, you're going to have a heck of a job finding a post by them, and if they've never posted at all, you're completely out of luck.) I suppose it's a step in the right direction but considering how long it took for even that minor improvement to come about, I don't hold out much hope for other improvements in the foreseeable future. The forum still looks about as lifeless as it's possible for a forum to get without actually being dead and it's still the ugliest, blandest forum I've ever come across. Looking at it now, it's impossible to see if there's anyone even logged onto it. Alex Warren couldn't have done a better job of ruining Quest if he'd tried.

I guess it shouldn't bother me so much because it's not like I've even tried to use Quest in years, and it's a long time since I bothered playing any Quest games, but it bothers me how good the forum used to be over there and how one person messed it up so badly. And I still don't understand why he did it or why the people in charge now don't just come to their senses and fix things.

David Whyld wrote:I guess it shouldn't bother me so much because it's not like I've even tried to use Quest in years, and it's a long time since I bothered playing any Quest games, but it bothers me how good the forum used to be over there and how one person messed it up so badly. And I still don't understand why he did it or why the people in charge now don't just come to their senses and fix things.

I can accept one person having a remarkably bad idea and doing something stupid, but there's a whole team of people doing it now and they've continued doing it for an entire year. And they act like the people wanting a real forum again are the unreasonable ones, which is the part that really makes it bizarro world over there.

I did actually get an acknowledgement from the guy running the forum (Manowar, I think his name is) that the forum isn't great and definitely needs improving, but so far the only change he's brought about is the messaging system, which is still miles behind the messaging system the old forum had. He seems quite reluctant to discuss further changes, though, and I get the feeling that he's keeping his head down and hoping all the fuss blows over eventually. Unfortunately, that doesn't bode well for the future if the person solely responsible for the running of the forum isn't interested in any other improvements.